Israel demolishes Bedouin homes east of Jerusalem

Israeli forces on Feb. 17 bulldozed five steel structures belonging to a Palestinian community in the East Jerusalem town of al-Eizariya, locals said. A large group of Israeli forces raided the town after midnight and surrounded steel structures belonging to the Bedouin al-Jahalin community. Israeli soldiers forcibly evicted five families from the structures, leaving 55 people homeless, Sami Abu Ghaliya, a spokesman of the al-Jahalin tribe council, told Ma'an News Agency. The demolitions took place without giving residents time to gather their belongings. The structures housed a greengrocers and a car wash which provided the main source of income for the community. "They want to displace us and leave us homeless as they did to us in the Nakba of 1948 and the Naksa of 1967," Abu Ghaliya said. "We have been living on this land since more than 60 years."

Israel is planning to displace the al-Jahalin tribe to build part of its separation wall in the area, a spokesman of the Palestinian youth movement in East Jerusalem, Hani Halabiyya, told Ma'an. In the 1950s, the al-Jahalin community was forcibly displaced from its ancestral home in the Negev desert and resettled east of Jerusalem. Israeli forces displaced groups of the community in the 1990s to make way for the Maale Adumim settlement.